Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/diversion/page/3/)
Like most, when I became a juvenile probation officer I entered the field envisioning myself as a counselor or a mentor. But my day-to-day duties were centered around surveillance, compliance monitoring and paperwork, and the composition of my caseload further complicated matters.
Juvenile probation professionals know better than most the multitude and complexity of issues our justice-involved youth are facing, and what puts these young men and women at risk for violence. Get IN Chicago, as a youth violence prevention funder working to support the most effective and promising interventions in Chicago, wanted to better understand the youth probation population to inform quality service provision.
Like it or not, cops in schools are here to stay. The question is: How do we do it right? An important principle for doing it right is driven by this key question: How can we help make sure that law enforcement actually works to keep youth in school and out of justice involvement?
Although the stated objective of juvenile justice in Arkansas is rehabilitation, until very recently almost all our juvenile courts followed a cookie-cutter approach in adjudicating cases.
While we have made enormous progress in many states in reducing detention numbers and closing prisons, too many youth are still spending the night behind bars. Surprisingly, New Zealand provides the United States with a helpful model for effective ways to right size our system by limiting arrests.
The program is short: two counseling sessions, two hours each. But for teens and adults who have been arrested for the first time, it can save them from a lifetime with a criminal record.
Want to keep youth out of the juvenile justice system?
Maybe the best way is not to lock them up in the first place.
In July 2017, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), adopted a resolution in support of developmentally appropriate juvenile justice probation services. The resolution, which built on earlier NCJFCJ policies, made clear that it “supports and is committed to juvenile probation systems that conform to the latest knowledge of adolescent development and adolescent brain science.”
All children make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes get them in trouble with the law. It happens in all kinds of families and in all kind of neighborhoods.
On a cloudy September afternoon in Santa Cruz, California, I am standing in the probation complex parking lot talking on the phone with Chief Probation Officer Fernando Giraldo.